What happens in the Data Center, ends up here.

Dell World – Go Big or Go Home, Baby! [Day 2]

The only thing Michael didn’t do during the keynote was drop the mic – but I think that’s just because he was wearing a lapel mic – otherwise, he would have done it. The underlying themes of Dell World 2015 are pretty simple: This EMC thing we’re doing is great for customers. This EMC thing we’re doing is great for our company. This EMC thing is just another step in a long line of decisions we’ve made specifically to further drive our ability to innovate. Getcha Popcorn Ready!

Kicking off the keynote, Michael Dell recounted numerous analysts and pundits who asked him how or if he’s still going to do acquisitions after taking Dell private. His response? “Go Big or Go Home, Baby!”

Dell dove right in with no lifejacket when discussing the new Federation of companies and the synergies they have. Leaders in Storage, “Dell and EMC together. The combined capabilities of this partnership are endless”. Referencing the 3rd platform, digital transformation, software defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, and more, and reminding the crowd that we become a company that is a leader in 22 Gartner Magic Quadrants together.

“EMC is the best company in the industry at incubating new technology. And we plan to mirror the EMC approach of a strategically aligned family of businesses. And that front-end engine will be backed by Dell’s best-in-class global supply chain.” This is a distinctly different vision than the street and media have been painting of the merger, and is going to be very fun to watch.

“The best innovation. With the Highest Quality. And the greatest value for customers”

It took roughly 30+ minutes before a single piece of hardware was mentioned in the keynote. The first product to share the massive video wall was the Dell Datacenter Scalable Solution DSS7000.

The DSS (Datacenter Scalable Solutions) team is a close relative of the DCS (Data Center Solutions) team. The DCS group creates highly customizable hyper-scale products for telco, oil & gas, service providers, and other customers with highly specialized needs at massive scale. One example of the DCS team’s work is their MDC (Modular Data Center) solution which is leveraged by the likes of eBay, Bing, Dell Corporate, and many more. the MDC is a *shipping* container-based solution that is self-contained, open-air cooled, and has one of the best PUE ratings in the industry.

While DCS is out creating highly customized hyper-scale products like the MDC, DSS is focused down market a bit to customers who need similar repeatable technology but in more of a rack scale conversation. DSS products can be customized, but not nearly to the variety of DCS in order to make it easy to deploy and ship in massive quantities. Along with the DSS7000, the DSS line features the DSS1500 and 2500.

When speaking with the product managers for the DSS line, they had discussed 2.5″ drive bays for higher density on the 2500, but they felt there was not enough interest for that density at this time. I suggested it would be pretty easy to change the bay and backplane – they said it definitely would, and they would do it for the first customer that asked for a proper quantity. (you hear that, VCE?)

Looking at the conversation from a scale perspective, Dell enables EMC to address software-defined center solutions at the hyper-scale (DCS), rack-scale (DSS), and appliance level – or basically any customer use case that can be dreamed up. Combine that with the information we’re gathering today on the FX2 and VRTX lines of business (coming soon to a blog post near you!) and add the ability to do very unique data center, ROBO, and microserver implementations as well. More to come on Open NFV innovations, FX/VRTX, Cloud Solutions, and more – but for now we’ll leave you with a few detail pictures of the DSS line: